Post-Election Analysis

A good many liberals and progressives are shocked at Bush’s victory. Republican gains in the Senate and House only make it worse.    It is not that we were unaware of the Republican advantages. We knew that the Bush campaign constant talk of the war on terror stirred fear and excitement among many voters that worked to…

Political commentary is always replete with exaggerations: it fits the need of the culture industry. Even the greatest thinkers like Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno tended to take the experience of a crucial historical moment and extrapolate its most dramatic implications into the future: it’s a natural inclination. But the victory of George W. Bush…

Is it really the case that, as the British tabloid the Daily Mirror famously put it, nearly 60 million Americans were simply too “dumb” to understand the implications of reelecting George W. Bush? It seems so. Even though few Americans had personally benefited from the regressive social and economic policies of the president’s first term,…

Was the 2004 election, perchance, fixed? 1 in 5 Americans, according to a December Gallup poll, suspect so.[1] Four out of five fellow Americans never heard a peep about rigging, believed scoffing authorities, or, being Bush backers, gloated. The first whiff our solid, and mostly white, middle class usually got of electoral mischief was the…